'Freedom Evolves': Evolution Explains It All for You

By GALEN STRAWSON

Published: March 2, 2003

In the last several years the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has published two very large, interesting and influential books. The first, ''Consciousness Explained'' (1991), aimed to account for all the phenomena of consciousness within the general theoretical framework set by current physics. It failed, of course, and came to be affectionately known as ''Consciousness Ignored.'' But it was a very fertile and valuable piece of work. The second, ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea'' (1995), set out to make the case for the theory of evolution even more irresistible than it already is, and it was right on target: vivid, ingenious and illuminating, if sometimes huffy and overpolemical.

Now Dennett is advancing on free will. In ''Freedom Evolves,'' he wants to show how evolution can get us ''all the way from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions.'' And he succeeds in his aim, given what he means by freedom. But he doesn't establish the kind of absolute free will and moral responsibility that most people want to believe in and do believe in. That can't be done, and he knows it.

So what does Dennett mean by freedom? Well, he's a ''compatibilist'': he thinks that freedom is wholly compatible with determinism, although determinism is the view that everything that happens in the universe is necessitated by what has already happened, so that nothing can ever occur otherwise than it actually does. He thinks, in other words, that you can be wholly free and morally responsible for your choices and actions even if every single one of them was determined by events that happened long before your birth. You think this a strange notion of freedom? Me too. But here Dennett is part of an old tradition that stretches from the ancient Greeks through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and many others, and was the orthodoxy among analytic philosophers for most of the 20th century.

This compatibilist freedom -- call it C-freedom -- seems intensely unsatisfactory. It doesn't give us what we want and are sure we have: ultimate, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do, of a kind that can make blame and punishment and praise and reward truly just and fair. It allows, after all, that the whole course of our lives may be fixed down to the last detail before we've even been conceived. But one of Dennett's main aims is precisely to convince us that C-freedom is all that is really worth having in the way of freedom. His basic position has not changed since his book ''Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting'' (1984). It is restated here with new story-bells and example-whistles, and responses to recent work by other writers.

Dennett is a compatibilist about freedom, but a compatibilist can be a creationist and believe that we have immaterial souls. Dennett will have none of that. He's a supercompatibilist. He not only grants that determinism may be true, he is also an ''uncompromising'' materialist, one who holds that every phenomenon in the universe is wholly physical or material. He is also committed to a completely ''naturalistic'' approach to the problem: one that rules out the existence of anything that would be classified as supernatural from the perspective of the natural sciences. And he thinks that everything about us can be explained within the framework of the theory of evolution. His claim, then, is that the existence of human freedom, free choice, free action, free will is entirely compatible with materialism, naturalism, determinism and the theory of evolution.

Is this plausible? Yes. Given that Dennett is talking only about C-freedom, I'm sure he's right. I'm sure he's right that all the freedom of choice and action and will that we actually have is a product of evolution. But his rhetoric is all wrong. He stands forth as the lone ranger of hard truth, the indomitable, beleaguered word-warrior fighting a vast rampant dragon of misguided and aggressive orthodoxy. But most philosophers (and a host of others) fully agree with him that determinism may be true and that a materialist, naturalistic, evolutionary approach is best, and find it obvious that C-freedom is compatible with all these things. They also know that there is no way in which the falsity of determinism -- the existence of truly random or indeterministic occurrences in the universe -- could help to give us greater freedom of will or moral responsibility (many have been beguiled by this last idea, though it doesn't take much thought to see that it won't work).

As for the basic story of how evolution gives rise to C-freedom, Dennettian free will, it's just the story of how we evolved, period. It has no special extra features. So if you already accept the general idea that we are products of evolution, you don't really have to look any farther to accept that C-freedom evolved. How does the story go? Well, it's obvious (looking across living species rather than backward in time) that we have more freedom than a chemically switched bacterium, or a clam that clams up by reflex when something strikes its shell, or a clever rat. We have more freedom than a bird that is as free as a bird, or a dog (even a very smart dog standing at the point of bifurcation of a raging river watching his master and mistress being carried away equidistantly down the two channels, looking agitatedly from side to side before plunging in after one or the other), or a smart chimpanzee. And we have more freedom, we take it, than a small child.